This invention relates to roadways for high performance rapid transit railways for overhung and/or underhung suspension vehicles including a suspension or supporting structure with means for carrying and guiding of the vehicles.
Conventional constructions of such roadways utilize reinforced concrete supporting or suspension structures, and the various rails and lines needed to sustain railway operations are attached to the suspension or supporting structures. In order to maintain the close tolerances needed to ensure the operability of overhung or underhung suspension vehicles, in the relative arrangement of the individual rails as well as in the absolute geometry of the track, these structures necessitate separately operable adjusting devices for the concrete main beams as well as for the rails attached thereto by means of supporting elements. Such structures thus require rather large expenditures and are hence expensive.
Due to the particular load capacity of main beams of reinforced concrete construction, these beams, if reasonably sized, may not exceed approximately 30 m in span. This poses special problems when track sections require a span length in excess of 30 m, as may be the case for bridges and overcrossings.
When the track section involves bends in the roadway or differences in elevation, conventional structures necessarily use traverse or polyonal courses in the section to approximate such bends in the suspension beams.
A further disadvantage of prior art structures utilizing concrete suspension structures, is seen in that these cannot be manufactured by shop production, but must be manufactured at the site. This entails relatively high labor costs. Another disadvantage is seen in that these reinforced concrete structures are hard to disassemble for re-use, for example, when the system is to be relocated. This is important in the case of experimental tracks. A still further disadvantage of conventional structures is due to the fact that the necessary high resonance frequency can be achieved only at high extra costs for respective structural features.